WHILE most of Brighton shopped its way through a special Saturday afternoon, a packed audience in The Lanes were privileged to hear a programme of piano music by living Sussex composers associated through New Music Brighton.
And the highly distinguished, locally-based pianist Adam Swayne brilliantly served a rich menu for St Valentine's Day.
Julia Broughton's Sonata Across Four Elements is inspired by the natural world, as depicted in one of its movements by the rhyth
m of flowing water combining with the "bobbing and darting of the bird".
And in another, by the desolation of the desert and, another, the hauntingly contemporary image of "wildfire". Broughton's work clearly engrossed the whole audience.
The occasional allusions to French Impressionism in Broughton's Sonata were echoed in Barry Mill's Three Pieces for Piano with their overt references to Ravel and Debussy, but reworked in Mills' own individual manner.
As in the Broughton, water was an image in The River at Val di Mello. Mills seduced the audience with exquisite harmonies hanging in the air with their evocative resonances, and the final trill of The Moon and the Stars seemed to resonate far into outer space.
John Alexander's enigmatically entitled "is will be was", drew away from Mills' reveries into the angst of introspection; into a world of disconnection and inner psychological conflicts.
Purposefully disconnected as the music was, it culminated in a long held chord from which emerged a slow cantilena of fragile beauty closing on an empty chord and the silence of the grave. The work was harmonically rich and had passages of poignant delicacy rubbing shoulders with jazz elements.
Jonathan Clark's Sonatina for Piano provided a stark contrast to the previous works with severe harmonic dissonances and rhythmic angularity, as if sculpted from stone rather than painted in wash.
The psychological references of Alexander's work informed Guy Richardson's Releasing. This also featured a distorted expression of a waltz at the beginning, its metamorphosis, and its return, harmonised in a more traditional style.
The whole piece worked as an analogue of tension and release.
Memories of past styles were concisely expressed in Patrick Harrex's Piano Pie. It would not have been out of place had four and twenty black birds flown free out of the piano.
For this was a work which drew together half-remembered fragments of earlier piano music (mainly by Chopin) into a surreal and original combination formed by the fertile imagination of its composer.
In similar vein, Ric Graebner's 12 Variations on a cadence by Francisco Tarrega (aka the Nokia ringtone) took as its starting point existing music in a kind of 21st century Diabelli Variations.
Graebner wove some extraordinary music from an even less promising theme than Diabelli's.
The atmosphere at this New Music Brighton event was lively and the audience was captivated not only by the sound of this truly contemporary piano music but also by the pianist's enthusiasm for it.
Not for some time has an NMB concert run out of programmes! Nor featured an encore, which was a delightful performance by Swayne of the Chopin Nocturne in Eb, which had been so wittily used in Harrex's Piano Pie – surely the food of love.
Play on Dr Swayne and play on New Music!
Click here to go back to classical music news.Click here to go back to dance.Click here to go back to leisure.Where are you? Add your pin to the Herald's international readers' map by clicking here.Email the Herald: letters@worthingherald.co.ukWant to read this page in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Urdu or 48 other
